Fever Dreams
by ElyahGray
Summary: When BJ contracts malaria after a trip to the 8063rd, he dreams of home, his coworkers, and how things might be different.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I suppose a disclaimer is customary, though it offers about as much legal protection as a Kleenex seatbelt. For the record: Neither MASH nor any of its characters or proprietary ideas belong to me. If they did, I'd muck up the series with blatant self-insertion, and I would also be considerably wealthy.

October, 1952

Between the 4077th and 8063rd MASH

BJ didn't mind the back-and-forth (usually more back than forth) jerking of the jeep, or having to take the literal backseat to a private and a first lieutenant, or being somewhat crushed between Lt. Callaway's suitcase and Cpl. Klinger's case of tinned hams. He didn't even mind the silence; after four solid days without casualties, which of course meant four solid days of the Hawkeye Pierce Mess Tent Mystery Odor Tour, a little judicious sullenness was more than welcome. Even if it was of the uncomfortably frosty variety – BJ didn't know any particulars, but the wedding ring that had reappeared on the lieutenant's finger as soon as she got her Milwaukee walking papers seemed to have Private Jowett in something of an uproar. BJ was just glad to be going for a ride. After two weeks of chilly fall rain the day had dawned flawlessly clear and just warm enough for a breeze to be welcome. They'd encountered no shelling and no snipers on the trip, and the day was so fine and pleasant BJ could almost pretend that he had simply made a strange choice of vacation destination, and Peg and Erin would be waiting for him at the end of the safari. That thought was all it took to puncture his high morale; the trip to the 8063 was actually to provide an extra set of hands for the enormous influx of wounded they were expecting.

Jowett braked hard when they approached the 8063rd and slapped the jeep's horn. "Need anything else, sir?" he asked, clearly just as a formality.

"No, thank you, Private," BJ answered, unfolding himself from the backseat. "Your nickel tour of the backwoods is more than enough to keep me in bed for a week."

The PFC didn't even kill the engine as BJ retrieved his medical bag and small suitcase. "Yes sir, I'll be back this evening, sir," he said, and slammed on the accelerator. BJ knew that "evening" was something of a stretch – he was just on his way to Seoul, less than twenty-five miles away, and then his orders were to come back and wait until BJ was ready to depart the 8063rd, but BJ figured he wanted to either spend a few last tearful minutes with Callaway at the airport or with some watered-down hooch in the adjacent bar. Either way, he didn't want to prevent it; if Jowett wanted to nurse a broken heart (BJ swallowed a laugh at the pun), that was Jowett's business. Callaway and Jowett were arguing before they were even out of earshot; BJ caught "whore" and "bastard" before he was approached by a handsomely vacant man not much older than BJ himself. He sported Lt. Colonel's clusters, though from the way he kept fingering his lapel, he couldn't have held them long.

"Captain Hunnicutt, I presume?" he asked, extending a hand.

"I find it suits me better than Dr. Livingstone," BJ answered with a grin. The other man didn't laugh, or even react. "BJ, please," he said, shaking politely.

"I'm Colonel Dubroff, C.O. here at the 8063. I'm sorry we weren't able to reach your man in the clerk's office before you came all the way down here, BJ," he started.

"Uh-oh."

"The big influx of wounded we were supposed to get won't be turning up; apparently the North Koreans weren't where I-Corps thought they'd be, and the battle they expected didn't happen."

"It's hard to be upset about fewer wounded soldiers, Colonel," BJ answered cheerfully.

"Even so, I'm sorry to have you come down here just to send you back…" the officer blinked and looked around. "Where's your transport?"

"My driver had to see a man about a broken heart in Seoul. He'll be back to pick me up sometime this evening."

"I sure am sorry, BJ. We've got a couple of patients in Post-Op; if you need something to do, we could always use a second opinion, even though most of our interesting cases have been evac'd to the 121st. Otherwise you're welcome to grab some coffee in our mess tent, or there's a bar just down the road a stretch." Now that BJ looked around, the camp didn't really look like it was preparing for an influx of wounded – it seemed mostly empty, and those personnel he could see were loitering over leisure activities or attending their appointed duties without urgency. A nurse abandoned the game of checkers she was playing outside a tent to cross the compound towards BJ and Col. Dubroff.

"Thanks. That was a bit of a bumpy trip; I could do with something to make my stomach worse. Which way to the mess?"

"I can show him, sir," said the nurse, who had approached her C.O. in hopes of an introduction.

"That'll be fine, thank you, Robbins," he answered. "This is Captain Hunnicutt."

"Yes, sir," she said. The Colonel made a vague statement of need to return to whatever he had been doing and wandered back to his own office, while the nurse, a captain herself, extended her own hand. "I'm Madeline Robins – Madeline, please."

"I'm BJ." They shook hands, then she walked with him around the tent where she had been playing checkers.

"Sorry about the colonel," she said, smiling. "He's a good enough guy so long as you don't ask him to count too far past ten with his boots on. He's just awfully new to command; he doesn't understand that when I-Corps says 'jump' the correct response is 'are you sure?' rather than 'how high?' So he panicked a little when he heard we were getting so many wounded."

BJ laughed, more to acknowledge that she'd made a joke than out of actual amusement. "Better an overreaction than the opposite."

"I'll say," she said. "I'm glad you're here." BJ gave her a sidelong glance, but she wasn't flirting; she wasn't even looking at him. She wore an engagement ring, and even if she were looking for outside company she was pretty enough – not to BJ's taste, but as good looking as the as some of the more popular nurses at the 4077.

"Oh?"

She laughed. "I'm sorry, I'm being very cryptic! You work with Hawkeye Pierce, right?"

"Hey, if he owes you money, I can't get him to pay his gambling debts to me, much less anyone else."

"No, no, it's nothing like that!" She led him into a mess tend much like their own mess tent. BJ had to stoop a little to avoid banging his head on the lintel, and when he didn't look interestedly at the chow line, she led him to a massive samovar of coffee. "Hawkeye told me you're from Mill Valley," she said, taking a cup for herself.

"Home sweet home," he said with a wistful smile.

"We're practically neighbors!" she said cheerily. "I'm from Sausalito! My whole family lives just off Caledonia Street!"

"Oh, that's great!" They took a seat together and began drinking the atrocious coffee. "There's nothing like a neighbor to make home seem a little closer."

"Amen," she smiled. "Do you know, on Caledonia, the restaurant with the wrought-iron seagulls over the door?"

"With the spectacular view of the City and the awful pie? Aggie's Kitchen?"

"That's the place!" She laughed. "Awful pie? I'll have you know my sister-in-law is their cook and bakes those very pies!"

"She does not!" BJ said in laughing disbelief.

"Okay, she doesn't." The nurse leaned in close. "She buys them at the grocery store. Don't tell anybody!"

BJ laughed riotously.

Over the course of the morning they drank several cups of coffee, comparing notes on views of the Bay and urban growth in San Francisco, the growing danger of driving highway 101 and rising housing prices in Stinson Beach. To his embarrassment, BJ found himself growing a little misty at their discussion of the California sky – "They just don't get the right color blue over here," – and was almost happy for the relief from bittersweet nostalgia when she announced that it was her turn for a shift in the lab.

"I guess I'll go see what's going on in Post-Op," BJ said. "I'd like to be a bit useful, seeing as I came all the way out here."

"There's nothing there except a case of food poisoning and a couple of fractures," Robins said dismissively. "You should go on our nature walk! It's great. Goes past a little stream, and there are lupin; on a day like today, if you squint a little and don't listen to the birds too closely, you could almost be in California."

BJ smiled sadly. "Sounds nice."

"It's an all purpose reminder of the States, I think; Major Browdy says she thinks it's just like Effie, and Swanski – our clerk – says all he needs is a cheesesteak and he could be in Haverford. Hey, Swanski!" she called.

An apple-cheeked corporal abandoned his mostly-empty tray and the argument that was brewing at an adjacent table. "Yeah, Captain?"

"Keep an eye on Captain Hunnicutt's bags, and show him where the nature walk is, will you? I've got duty."

"Sure thing," said the corporal, picking up BJ's suitcase with practiced lack of effort. "This way, Captain; it's a real pretty walk, I'm sure you'll like it."

"Oh, I'm sure I'll like anything Captain Robins orders me to like," BJ said, amused at the way she had more-or-less ordered him to go traipsing through the Korean wilderness.

"Yeah, she's like that," grinned the corporal. "It really is a sight to see, though."

"I believe it," BJ said affably.

"Okay, this is the start of it. The path is marked by olive drab stakes, as long as you can see one, you know you're in an area that's been de-mined. If you can't see a stake, just shout for a while; somebody that knows the area'll hear eventually and send you out a guide. Don't go into the creek, and don't drink the water; the doctor's say it's not potable 'cause the locals throw waste into it upstream. You don't have to worry too much about NK this far south, but you see any red uniforms you run first and ask questions later. Any questions?"

"Yeah, is this a nature walk, or a torture museum?" Swanski shrugged. "Thanks, Corporal. You'll keep an eye on my stuff?"

"You got it, doc. Have a nice walk."

"Thanks."

The clerk's extended warning notwithstanding, the walk was actually quite splendid. The path – really a well-worn footpath, marked more by packed bare earth than flimsy balsa stakes with scraps of green fabric tied to them – wound through the scrubby flora before entering a copse of taller trees that clustered around a rapid-flowing creek. In spite of concerns about bacterial infestation, it was quite picturesque; a bed of stones impeded the river's flow and produced a cheerful babble. Someone had used an axe and sandpaper to shape a fallen tree and stump into a passable table and chairs, and, to judge by the litter of empty bottles surrounding the table, the hardworking soldiers of the 8063rd considered the retreat a nice place to relax.

BJ dislodged a beer bottle to sit on the more comfortable-looking chair, carefully positioned to use a living tree as a backrest. Robins was right; when he pulled his dog tags out of his shirt so he couldn't feel the metal against his chest and half closed his eyes, it was almost like the day he and Peg had gotten lost on a walk on Mount Tamalpias. They made camp and ate Oreos and, in perfect solitude, barked at the moon and declared their love for one another.

Thinking about that day produced such bittersweet longing that BJ found himself completely unable to move. So he did what any self-respecting doctor would do on an afternoon with no patients and a natural lullaby: He fell asleep.

Author's notes:

Seeing as I was just a glimmer in a parental eye when MASH finished its run, my knowledge of 1950s culture runs only deep enough to know that victory gardens were out of vogue and hairstyles ranged from laughable to nightmarish. So I'm sure the story is peppered with anachronisms; if you note any particularly egregious problems please let me know, either by review or email. And speaking of reviews! It would be a lie for me to suggest that reviews lead to faster chapters, but they do make me feel a whole lot better about taking time away from writing my headed-nowhere-fast research proposal, and if they're constructive, they may make for better subsequent chapters.


	2. Chapter 2

For Hawkeye back at the 4077, things were slightly livelier, but somewhat less pleasurable. He and Charles spent their afternoon stitching new injuries and re-wrapping old from a brawl that had broken out at Rosie's between two groups of mostly recuperated Marines. The worst injured occupied three beds in Post-Op, and Colonel Potter, backed by a half-dozen MPs, loaded the rest onto ambulances (over their protestations, they wanted to stay back with their buddies) heading for Seoul or back to the line.

Hawkeye was bored.

There was boredom and there was boredom, and this was the latter kind: They hadn't had casualties in so long he'd welcomed the re-injury of personnel he'd treated a week ago. BJ was gone, but even if he were back in the Swamp they'd just glug gin and bore each other with letters from home. Winchester did his best to be irritating, but lately his insults just didn't have the same sting. Hawkeye almost wished Frank Burns were around, just so an elaborate prank would be worth planning. Even the nurses had heard all his come-ons; instead of being amused or affronted, they just rolled their eyes and ignored him. It was almost enough to make him yearn for casualties.

Hawkeye had heard stories from World War Two, of men trapped in submarines so long that they started to go more than a little insane. Some comrade of his father's told stories of elaborate games of Iron Gullet among the enlisted men: They would raid the kitchen for canned whatever, and prepare hideous delicacies by mixing whatever they filched. The man able to keep the most horrible mess down was declared the winner.

Hawkeye'd never understood what could drive a person to that kind of disgusting behavior until he'd spent an entire afternoon staring at the tent ceiling and trying to calculate the total number of pairs of shoes in Korea. He even envied BJ his junket to the 8063rd, and that was a sorry state of affairs – envying a man because he could see real wounded, instead of macho jerks that made themselves sicker in a drunken bar brawl. Hell, Hawkeye even envied the participants of the bar brawl itself!

The nurses were bored with him, he'd already irritated Charles, Margaret, Colonel Potter, and even Father Mulcahy to dangerous levels; he supposed he could empty the still until he slept, but he would just wake up in a few hours and be more miserable for the hangover.

It wasn't like Hawkeye had infinite hobbies. After surgery and drinking came womanizing, and after that teasing and being teased by friends. Once all of those were eliminated, there was only scheming.

Come to think of it, scheming didn't sound so bad. Hawkeye sat up in his bunk, genuinely interested in something for the first time in days. He grinned at nothing in particular.

BJ had a birthday coming up, didn't he?

---

When BJ woke up, the sun had moved considerably towards the horizon and he could already feel a wicked sunburn spreading across his cheeks, nose and chin. He didn't mind that, or the half-dozen mosquito bites he could feel on his arms and neck; the dream he'd had of Peg had been one of the most vivid he'd had in weeks, and he could still hear the little trill she laughed when startled. He tucked his dog tags back into his shirt and walked back to the 8063rd's camp, hungrier than he'd been in recent memory.

Unfortunately, the war had caught up with his leisure time. The sleepy camp now resembled a nest of irritated termites. Enlisted men swarmed over every outdoor surface, and nurses ran in and out of tents in varying states of disassembly. "BJ, thank God!" called Madeline, loading a crate of ice-packed plasma into an ambulance. "I was getting ready to send out a search party!"

She slapped the dust off her hands and walked over to BJ. "I'm sorry," he said, surprised at himself. "I guess I dozed off."

"Oh, that's no problem, now that you're back here, but we've got orders to bug out, and we were worried that we'd have to leave you."

"Bug out, really?"

"It seems the lull is over, and the Chinese are on the way. Your driver's back; some corpsmen threw him in the showers to sober him up."

"Thanks, Madeline."

"Well, it was self-interested; I was hoping I could talk you into taking one of our fractures with you to the 4077. He's stable, no problem, but Dr. Rowen's worried his leg'll get misaligned and in the chaos we won't have time to fix it properly."

"Shouldn't be a problem, if you can spare somebody to help me get him loaded."

"Great. This is a nice, leisurely bug out; we've had plenty of advance warning for once."

Stretching the soldier, a friendly supply sergeant who'd run afoul of a Canadian tank while intoxicated, across the backseat of the jeep was quick work, though it required putting the case of Snickers bars Klinger had gotten for the hams in the well of the passenger seat. Private Jowett was in no condition to drive; if he couldn't construct a simple declarative statement BJ wasn't going to let him operate a massive piece of machinery. BJ hopped in the driver's seat and the damp, miserable private climbed in next to him, resting his feet on the dash, for the rattling drive home.

---

November 1952 (two weeks later)

4077th MASH

BJ strongly suspected he was dreaming. He knew he was standing on his front porch, but it didn't look anything like his actual front porch; his was whitewashed, and hosted several comfortable but battered pieces of patio furniture. This was natural wood, long splintered and grey with age, and the paint on the front door was flaking off in long strips. If he'd stopped to think about it, he could've come up with a more conclusive answer about whether it was really a dream or not, but a sense of urgency propelled him onward, into his house that wasn't his house.

BJ looked down at himself. He was wearing a dress uniform, but he wore major's leaves instead of his own captain's bars, and he wore his sidearm. He wanted to take them off, but dimly he knew there wasn't time.

Up a long flight of stairs (the real stairwell was much farther from the door, wasn't it?), Peg awaited him. He grinned up at her, and with infinite slowness and grace she descended. Her expression was beatific.

Peggy was dressed in one of the most absurd getups BJ had ever seen – it looked like something an inept dressmaker might create had they heard a description of Elizabethan finery, but never seen a picture. The dress was violent blue velvet, with a full skirt that came down to Peg's ankles, but was slit far up the side, displaying a length of ankle and impractical high heels. She wore a bodice with a false corset that began far lower than anything Peg normally would ever wear outside their bedroom. BJ grinned. The sight of her was sweeter than anything; her presence alone was enough to make him happier, like a warm bellyful of sweet tea. Every time she set her right foot down, BJ could see her ankle clear up to the mole on her outer thigh, the point he'd always considered the three-quarter mark of her leg. BJ's smile turned wolfish; he suspected he was going to like the way this dream ended.

At last, after an eternity of anticipation, she reached the landing. BJ could smell her hair and hand lotion; he wanted to kiss her and never stop. Her smile was luminous, and he searched for the right words to convey what about her he had missed, and how desperately.

"You wan' goo'time, Joe?" Peg asked.

"What?" It wasn't Peg's voice. It was the voice of someone who had a brief primer in English from bad movies and bad people, and it was a call he had heard dozens of times in Korea, mostly from desperate guttersnipes too young to be suggesting it. BJ had always ignored it before, but hearing it here made him want to weep. He was home, but his wife had the voice of a Korean prostitute.

"Good time, Joe?" she said again, taking care to form all the sounds in a way that suggested phonetic memorization rather than real understanding of the words she spoke.

She wasn't Peggy.

He kissed her anyway; his lips on her lips, one hand curling in her upswept hair and the fingers of the other curled at her collarbone, finding purchase in the small hollow before arching finely around her neck. He pulled away from her and turned before she could ask for money, as he knew she, this not-Peg, would inevitably do.

The same force that had compelled him to go inside the house now turned him right, into the living room (isn't that the kitchen?) full of ruined and reclaimed furniture and silvery moonlight, where a little girl, no older than ten years old, sat silently on a torn brown ottoman, staring at nothing. She was a beautiful little waif, with enormous moonlit eyes and the graceful cheekbones of a movie star.

Peg-not-Peg was standing beside him, though he hadn't seen her move from the foot of the stair. He recognized a murderous glint in her eye for just a second (it was a relief to see it, there was his Peg, the old Peg) but it was gone in another. "Too young, Joe," she said, tugging at his arm. She tried to sound flippant, but BJ could hear fear even through her broken English. BJ ignored her to look at the little girl, and when his attention was elsewhere she flickered out in that peculiar way of dreams.

"Erin?" he asked fearfully. He knew this was his daughter (but that was impossible, he hadn't been gone that long, Erin was still a baby in a crib!), but he had to be cautious; she might've undergone the same dreadful transformation Peggy had.

She stood up and turned full to face him. "Hello, Daddy," she said calmly. "You look well."

He took a step closer, wanting to embrace her, but something about the formal little creature made him nervous. He knelt instead, so that his eyes were almost on the same plane as hers. "Erin, sweetheart, what happened here?"

Erin stared at him; he wondered why it had taken him this long to recognize that the hollow cheeks and protrusive eyes that had seemed lovely a moment ago were the products of acute childhood malnutrition. She reached up and stroked the rank insignia on his collar, then looked him straight in the eye. "You're a ten-cent soldier for a dime store cause," she said, her voice thick and terrible with adult contempt. "What were you expecting?"

He had no answer. Six thousand miles away in Korea, BJ Hunnicutt wrenched himself out of the dream and woke, shivering and damp with sweat.


	3. Chapter 3

"Yes, I understand that there are other – I _do_ understand that there are other packages in line ahead of mine," Hawkeye said into the handset, trying not to snarl. The sarcasm was audible, but the postal clerk he was not-quite-shouting at was completely deaf to it.

"Because the point is I need it sooner than that, so it can't sit in Kimpo for a week before you send it out here!"In frustration -- this was hour two andclerkno. 14 in his search -- Hawkeyeslapped the desk so hard that Mildred Potter, smiling serenely from her picture frame, jumped and shivered.

He turned his tone wheedling, though it galled him. "Well, maybe we can come to some kind of agreement," he suggested. "Maybe if it can get here a little sooner, I can give you a token of my gratitude for all the fine work you do?

"Good, great." Hawkeye rifled through the stacks of paper he'd swiped from Klinger's desk, looking for supply lists. "Well, I'm sure the rest of the unit would be pretty upset, but I think we could part with…" Excess commodities were marked with a "T" for "tradable" in the company clerk's not-so-neat hand; the list was relatively bare due to Klinger's recent extravagant bargaining for a real Halloween party, complete with candy for trick-or-treating for local children. "Oh, say, two cases of chipped beef?"

Hawkeye held the phone away from his ear with a grimace. "Oh, hey, that's just for starters! I'm sure we can…"

He leaned away from the phone again, this time more impressed by the man's vocabulary than shrinking from the noise. "Yeah, well, if you ever get up to Uijongbu I'm sure that I can demonstrate some anatomical impossibilities on you as well!" he shouted, then slammed the phone back into its canvas receptacle. He snatched up the papers and stalked out of the room, throwing them down on the clerk's desk with enough violence to cause Klinger to accidentally type a long sequence of gibberish in the previous morning's morning report. Klinger waited for the surgeon to stomp out into the compound before he picked up his own extension of the phone to repair whatever damage Hawkeye had done.

"Sparky? Klinger! How'd your roach race go? Wow, congratulations, buddy!" He consulted the same list Hawkeye had so recently abandoned, looking for likely prospects."Yeah, sure. Listen, I need to get through to the postmaster's office in Kimpo. Sure, I'll wait."

---

"Where the hell is Hunnicutt?" Margaret demanded as she hastily scrawled her signature on the supply form Nurse Baker had handed her. "His duty started half an hour ago!"

"I sent a corpsman to go find him a couple of minutes ago," Baker answered.

"Well, go yourself. Somebody needs to check on poor Angotti's tachycardia," she said, taking the soldier's wrist pulse.

"Yes, Major," Nurse Baker said, but only had time to hold the Post-Op doors open as Hawkeye and the corpsman she had sent half-dragged BJ into the infirmary, his arms around their shoulders.

"Really, Hawk, I'm fine," BJ protested. His face was ashen and he had sweat clear through his bathrobe at the neck and underarms; Margaret could tell from the scant resistance he put up to being nearly carried that the fight was nearly out of him.

"What happened?" she asked, indicating a vacant bed nearest the door, where BJ could at least have some semblance of privacy. Nurse Baker blushed and looked away when Margaret and Hawkeye removed BJ's robe, leaving the doctor clad only in his shorts, boots and tee-shirt, but recovered herself to help remove his boots at the head nurse's impatient gesture.

"I've got a cold, Hawkeye's making a mountain of a molehill," BJ answered as he was helped into bed.

"Captain Bligh here woke up in a sea of his own sweat and has now got a fever of at least 102," Hawkeye answered, depositing a thermometer into BJ's mouth. BJ glared.

"Mutineer," he mumbled around the thermometer.

"Threw up right over the side of his bunk, and now he's claiming that everything's fine," Hawkeye continued, palpitating the glands in BJ's throat, and then his abdomen. "Uh oh," he added as he prodded BJ's side, his voice somewhere between legitimate concern and I-told-you-so.

Margaret moved to the foot of BJ's bed. "What?"

"That feels like an enlarged spleen to me."

"Unh-uh," objected BJ.

"He's been sweating buckets and sleeping all the time, and talking in his sleep, come to think of it, and…does he look jaundiced to you?"

Now that Hawkeye mentioned it, there was a yellowish cast to BJ's skin. "Could be slightly jaundiced, yes."

"And jaundice on top of it."

"Unh-uh!" BJ said again, more violently.

"You didn't shut up about those damn mosquito bites for three days after you got back from the 8063rd, Beej," Hawkeye said gently, and took the thermometer out of BJ's mouth. "101.6."

"You think he's got malaria?"

"Draw some blood for a QBC and we'll see; get a blood count, too. I don't want to take any chances with anemia or liver function. Some poor sacrificial lamb should probably go and let Colonel Potter know."

Margaret paused in collecting the supplies for a blood test just long enough to clap Hawkeye on the shoulder. "See you in a minute, lambchop."

"Thanks, dumpling," he answered, already on his way out the door. In the hospital bed, which was only marginally less comfortable than his own lumpy mattress in the Swamp, BJ was already halfway asleep.

---

BJ had never before been to Toledo, but he didn't find it at all surprising. Everything was covered with a faint patina of dirt, and the people were rounder and unhappier looking than in California. BJ didn't know how they could bear to live so far from an ocean; the sense of being surrounded by so much land pressed on BJ as an almost painful psychic weight.

All the people were rounder and unhappier except Klinger, of course. He looked sleek and pleased; a vision of urban contentment in black-and-white wing tips. BJ was glad for his cheerful companionship as he led them on a grand tour of his hometown. Klinger was more than just a scrounger here, or so BJ understood when the waitress and manager at the hot dog joint where they'd had lunch refused to consider delivering a check: He was a king. Klinger's unique gifts and the honing they'd gotten in Korea had made him the Emperor of Toledo, and BJ imagined him rather romantically as a sort of Robin Hood. He robbed from the meatpackers to give to the hungry veterans, BJ thought with a grin, daubing at a mustard spot on his tie – he might've considered crossdressing himself to get home to hot dogs like those. And Klinger seemed pleased as anything to have BJ there. Not only had he insisted on taking him out to lunch, he had taken the afternoon off work – whatever that was; Klinger would only answer questions about his job in the vaguest of terms – to give him a tour of squalid, poverty-riddled downtown Toledo.

Klinger pointed out the local attractions: An arboretum; a slightly dilapidated theater; the boarded up stadium where the Mud Hens once played (most or all of the players had been drafted, and it hadn't seemed worthwhile to start a women's league); the university, though it was protected from view by a cyclone fence topped with ominous concertina wire. Klinger explained that UA forces were using it for munitions manufacturing, and unauthorized personnel were not allowed within spying distance. From the glowing terms in which Klinger spoke of his hometown, BJ could almost envision the magic Klinger himself saw in it, even as one grimy, unimaginative street faded into a series of dilapidated tenements.

"Listen, I've got to make a quick stop here, sir," Klinger said, indicating the grimmest building of all. It desperately needed a coat of whitewash; most of the windows had been boarded up, and the remaining few were shattered.

"You're going to buy me lunch and call me sir? It's BJ," he insisted. "Anyway, you lead and I'll follow," BJ answered cheerfully. He was finally beginning to shake off the sense of foreboding that had been troubling him all afternoon.

"No, I think you should probably wait here, Maj – uh, BJ." Klinger was still uncomfortable with the first name; it sounded foreign in his mouth. "This is kind of a rough neighborhood; they know me…"

"Oh, sure. I'll wait," BJ said, nodding his understanding. Klinger nodded his thanks and headed up the front steps. The front door didn't lock, so Klinger didn't need a key to enter; he vanished from BJ's field of vision quickly. He leaned against a lamppost to wait.

Casting around for anything of interest, BJ watched the passers-by. The street was almost free of cars, due to gasoline rationing, BJ supposed; a couple of pedestrians bicycled or walked past, but there was something odd about them. With a pang, he realized that they were all women – with the exception of Klinger and a boy exchanging ration stamps for wheat flour in a general store, he hadn't seen a single man anywhere. A woman in a WAC summer uniform smiled and fluttered a wave at him, and he grinned back at her, startled into it. She walked into a disreputable-looking bakery, and BJ settled against his lamppost again to wait.

He only rested there for a moment before a terrifying scream rent the air. It was only long practice in triage and OR that enabled to him to know that it was a man's scream; sheer pain had sapped the humanity out of the voice, giving it an animalistic quality. It came from one of the broken windows in the building Klinger had entered, but the voice was too low-pitched to be Klinger's. BJ started to run for the door, but slowed down after only a moment; any other time, he would be first up the stairs, but Toledo wasn't Korea and it certainly wasn't California, and he didn't exactly know the local rules.

Klinger bolted out the door moments later, frantically gesturing for BJ to follow him. BJ did, jogging to keep pace with him, though he kept frantically looking back at the window from which the screams eminated. Under Klinger's guidance, they both darted into the bakery that the WAC had gone in. She was gone, and there was no sign of the proprietor inside.

"What the hell happened back there?" BJ demanded, as soon as Klinger stopped hustling him forward.

"Business dispute," Klinger answered, wheezing a little from the run.

"What does that mean?"

"Come on, Major, there's a war on," Klinger said, with a disarming smile and a shrug, as if inflicting the kind of animal pain that BJ had heard was no more serious an undertaking than trading canned ham for chocolate bars. "Sorry. BJ," he said, with a broad grin. He no longer sounded uncertain about the name; indeed, he pronounced it with biting confidence, as a mark of his own authority.

"Klinger, did you _kill_ that man?"

"He'll be fine! He just needs a little incentive to pay his bills on time, is all." He smiled again, but BJ saw that it was more a baring of teeth than a gesture of friendliness.

"My God, Klinger," he said. He turned away from the former clerk and started walking back to the door. He would find the hurt man and help him, get him to a hospital if he needed it, but the world had taken on a curiously insubstantial quality and he found the walls weren't where they had been. The light had shifted into a golden ruddiness, as if he were seeing it through closed eyelids, and he could hear voices that sounded clearer and more substantial, more true-to-life, than they had been in the dream.

---

Author's notes redux:

I want to thank everyone who has been as generous with their time as to review this story! The reviews have made me very happy. If you have constructive criticism as well as delightfully ego-stroking praise (heh, not to imply that I don't enjoy the ego stroking and the praise), I'd appreciate hearing it (and I've got a pretty thick skin, so don't have too much concern over my potentially hurt feelings). Also, my apologies for the relatively long delay between the last chapter and this one; Word's Autosave and I had a misunderstanding fist shake and I lost a fair amount of work. The next chapter is already mostly written; you can expect it on Thursday or Friday. Thanks for reading!


	4. Chapter 4

"The army gives him a chloroquine tablet a week for a reason, _why_ hasn't he been taking them?" Potter asked, his voice rising to something approaching a wail.

"He couldn't tolerate it. Beej got cinchonism – enough to end all the olive drab around here," Hawkeye answered.

"Color distortion?"

"Mmm, and doubled vision, and vertigo, and some stomach problems that he didn't seem so keen on sharing. His first couple of weeks, the symptoms were so extreme he was having difficulty operating. He slaps a little DDT on before he heads out in the morning as a precaution, but malarial cases are way down this year – what, eight or nine in a thousand?"

"About eight and two thirds," put in Margaret.

"We figured he would be okay without it." Hawkeye shrugged, but didn't smile as he adjusted his friend's blanket. "I wish I'd…well, he needs it now, cinchonism be damned. The parasite count's high enough that he probably needs it intravenously."

"I'd say that's a good idea. Margaret, would you mind?"

"No, of course not."

"Someone should call Peg," Hawkeye said, obviously intending to place the call himself.

"You sit, Pierce," said Potter, not unkindly. "I'm headed that direction anyway."

"I should, I should…" Hawkeye protested, but his heart wasn't really in it. He wanted to sit and watch his friend, and the older man knew it. He ignored the feeble protest as the feint it was intended to be.

"I'll talk to her," Potter said with finality. His walk into his office was aborted when the loudspeaker abruptly burst to life.

"Attention all personnel: The latest in frostbitten winter fashion has arrived in an ambulance in the compound. Don't let them be caught dead without you!"

"Later," the colonel amended.

The announcement had wakened BJ, who was struggling upright in his uncomfortable bed. "Oh, no!" Hawkeye exclaimed, pointing back at the bed. "You stay right there!"

"Come on, Hawk, I'm not an invalid."

"No, no."

"Just for triage; I know I'm in no condition for surgery."

"It's twenty degrees outside! It was snowing an hour ago!"

"I'll put on my coat, Mom!" BJ had already dragged himself upright.

Hawkeye sighed; BJ's color was better, his tests had confirmed he wasn't anemic, and if he did himself any damage it wasn't like he would want for a physician. "Fine. But if you start getting any secondary symptoms, you get back in here. Understood?"

"Scout's honor!" BJ grinned.

In the dash to attend the wounded, Hawkeye had no more time to think about his friend's condition. Luckily the wounds weren't all that bad; the only patient of any concern was a WAC with a fractured clavicle and some symptoms of exposure. Charles arrived first and claimed the most interesting case, and Colonel Potter cited rank to assist him, leaving Hawkeye and a freshly-dressed, largely asymptomatic BJ to supervise the re-warming and bandaging of frozen flesh.

By themselves the injuries didn't even merit a trip away from the line, but the night would only get colder, and if Battalion Aid thawed the injured tissue only to have it freeze again the frostbitten would be worse off than if they'd gotten no medical treatment of all. Sending them to the hospital at least ensured that they would have someplace more-or-less heated for a couple of nights, decreasing the chances of worsening the injuries.

In addition to enlisted men suffering from exposure on the line, the ambulance contained a Lieutenant Colonel with a twisted ankle that Hawkeye suspected Battalion Aid had sent to the MASH more to get him to shut up than out of medical necessity. He tried to lecture Hawkeye for keeping him waiting, then went on to harangue him about how the boys fighting for their country deserved the very best. When Hawkeye intimated that perhaps the _very_ best way to thank them might be to send them home before they made the close acquaintance of shrapnel, the man gave him the silent treatment, which suited Hawkeye just fine – he wanted to eavesdrop on BJ, to make sure the sickness wasn't causing him to make poor medical decisions.

"Hey, there, Culvert, how're your fingers feeling?" BJ asked, taking the chart off the foot of his bed. Culvert, an infantryman, was one of the easiest cases. He was sitting up in Post-Op, resting his severely chilled left hand in a bedpan of warm water.

"Better, thanks, Doc. My hand stopped burning." The kid faked a smile, but he still looked worried.

BJ smiled reassuringly. "That's a good sign. Let's take a look, but don't move your fingers just yet." BJ took his hand out of the basin and gently articulated the boy's fingers. "You play the guitar?"

"Yeah," said the private with a grin. "How could you tell?"

He took a length of gauze and began carefully wrapping each finger individually. "You've got calluses on your fingertips. My wife had the same ones when she was about your age."

"Am I gonna be able to play the same, Doc?" Culvert looked fearfully at the doctor.

BJ grinned at the young man, pleased to be able to give him good news. "Look at that pink, healthy skin. You'll be fine, no lasting damage."

"Hey, thanks!" he said, the look of concern finally slipping off his face.

"No problem. We'll keep you another day or two, to make sure the injuries don't refreeze."

"I don't know how to thank you, Doc," he said, grinning elatedly.

"Just don't get sent back here again," BJ said.

"You got it."

Without meaning to, BJ sat down hard on the edge of the adjacent bed. He felt as though thousands of pins were being jabbed into all his extremities, not hard enough to break the skin, but hard enough to irritate. "Oh, boy. Hey, Hawkeye?" he called.

Hawkeye put a clip on the bandage to hold it secure, then looked up. "Always vigilant!" he answered with wave.

"I think I'm going to take a quick nap. Do you mind taking over?" He stood to go to his own temporary bed, but his head kept ascending until it seemed he was in danger of punching straight through the canvas ceiling. It was difficult to direct his feet from a hundred yards above them, but with care and patience he managed to guide them long enough to flop down at the foot of the bed. He couldn't get his feet up, but they seemed to have taken on independent management, anyway.

"No problem." BJ didn't look so hot. "You want me to get Margaret to come read you a bedtime story?"

BJ muttered a response, but it was inaudible. "Hey, is he all right?" asked Culvert, just as the nosy parker lieutenant colonel started ranting that in all his years in this man's army, he'd never before seen such a complete lack of dedication from doctors, to take a nap in the middle of treating wounds.

---

By now, BJ knew enough to be able to recognize when he was in a fever-induced malaria dream. They all shared a peculiar quality; though they were unusually vivid, everything at the periphery of BJ's vision was shaded in impossible neon colors. However, merely knowing it was a dream wasn't enough to shelter him from the fear instilled in him by his surroundings.

He was in a prison – a dingy, dirt-floored, lightless place with the stench of the tangible evidence of human misery pervading. That wasn't intrinsically troubling; he'd seen to patients in UN prison camps before. This wasn't one of those, though. BJ could tell the instant he looked at the wall in front of him, where "NO LOUD TALKING" was printed in three languages.

Russian first, Chinese second, English third, in smaller letters. It wasn't an American prison, but a communist prison for American prisoners. His anxiety was almost palpable; if the previous two dreams had been bad, this would be awful.

Flanked by two men in rust-colored uniforms, BJ could not help but step forward nervously. Evidently the guards expected that, for neither objected; they let BJ get about three paces ahead before following. That was good, a hopeful sign that BJ himself was not a prisoner. His uniform was pressed and pristine – obviously not the product of combat or capture – and he still wore the major's clusters; maybe he was on some kind of bureaucratic errand. BJ wouldn't volunteer for that kind of duty, though; prisons made him nervous. Especially this prison; even from just the small segment he had seen, he could tell from the way the hallways stretched endlessly in either direction that the compound was titanic. Though the poor ventilation – the fetid stench of the jail was a combination of new smells and old – and the shoddy construction suggested the building had been erected in a hurry, it obviously held men who had been prisoners for a great many months, to judge by their emaciated condition. Every dozen or so feet, BJ passed a solid iron door with a barred window just below his eye level; behind every door crouched four or six young men in varying degrees of squalor and emaciation. All wore identical expressions of shell-shocked apathy, giving BJ the impression that he was seeing not hundreds of miserable soldiers, but the same tortured man contorted into every possible permutation of degradation and torment.

At last they reached the end of the gallery of horrors. At the end of the hallway a more formidable-looking door of steel with warnings in Cyrillic and Chinese characters scripted in red letters blocked further passage.

One of the jailers – BJ thought of him as Young Stalin, because he was attempting to grow a moustache like the general secretary's, but was too young to have it come in evenly – stepped forward, key in hand, and unlocked the portal. The door was poorly balanced and very thick, and the other jailer had to help him push to open it. It was no wonder they didn't have the strength; the guards, boys in their late teens who looked like Soviet Bloc conscripts, were nearly as malnourished-looking as their charges.

Apprehensive about the horrors he would face on the other side, BJ stalled for a moment by plucking at his sleeve before walking inside. The guards did not follow, but waited mutely from their posts on either side of the door with a patient boredom that suggested long practice. In the room, a larger and perhaps temporary holding cell, were a few dozen relatively strong-looking but seriously injured prisoners, mostly wearing battered and dark-stained American or UA uniforms. They had seen combat, and recently: though none were in immediate danger of bleeding out, several oozed blood in small amounts, and BJ could faintly smell gunpowder among the more human odors of blood and piss and pain that pervaded the cell. Many of these men were still better off than their colleagues in other parts of the prison, however; they were sturdy and properly muscled, and had obviously seen full rations in recent memory. Some grunted or sighed with pain, but most spoke in low tones to one another. The few that were ambulatory came to attention when BJ entered the room. Others saluted halfheartedly where they sat or lay.

"Major, sir!" a familiar voice demanded. Margaret Houlihan was one of those who came to full attention. Her uniform was nearly complete; she'd lost one of her epaulet clusters and her cap, and she'd been wearing the uniform so long soils were ground irreparably into the fabric, but she looked reasonably presentable and uninjured. BJ would've liked to have embraced her, but as soon as she saw him step forward she widened her eyes in warning and he stopped short and saluted back. Margaret dropped her formal posture and knelt again next to a slowly bleeding soldier.

"Doctor, please help me see to Corporal Culvert," she asked, not suggesting through any partiality of tone that she knew him from Adam.

"Of course, Major," he answered, and dropped down beside her.

Culvert, the same cherubic young man who'd had frostbite back when BJ was awake, was here missing his left arm just above his elbow. It had been amputated crudely, but effectively, and cauterized. The young man himself appeared to be in shock. He didn't look at either major but stared at the corrugated tin ceiling, the whites of his eyes showing all around.

"Are you here for prisoner exchange, BJ?" Margaret asked in an undertone, pretending to take Culvert's pulse. He didn't appear to be the most seriously injured person in the room, but BJ understood why she had chosen him for BJ's partly-pretended ministrations: he was in so much shock that he could hardly be expected to understand, much less repeat, their conversation.

"Yeah," he answered, too low to be heard by anyone else. "I'm collecting names of those fit to travel but not fit to head back into combat on our side."

She nodded.

"Can I put your name down, Margaret?" he asked.

"No," she answered. To his surprise, her tone wasn't severe, merely weary. Some of his confusion must have shown on his face, because she elaborated. "I'm the only American in the camp who knows anything more than first aid, and if the reds have a doctor, he doesn't treat prisoners. The longer I stay, the more lives I can save. I can tell you who to take, though."

BJ has a medical kit with him – not enough for surgery, but enough to sedate and bandage Culvert. He suspected this would be the first restful sleep the corporal got since he'd been captured.

"Do you need anything? Are they treating you all right?"

Margaret's deadened expression softened a little, and she looked at BJ with gratitude. "I'm all right." She smiled wanly, glancing occasionally over at the guards to make sure they weren't eavesdropping. "I think the soldiers like having a woman around. They do their best to help me; they share their rations and things like that."

BJ thought it more likely she was sharing her food with them, but didn't say so. "Are things on the line as bad as they say?" he asked instead.

"What line?" she asked venomously. "Every place I saw on the northern front can't hold a line for more than half a minute; mostly we're reduced to guerrilla fighting from the forest. Don't believe a damn word you read in the papers."

"Oh," was all BJ answered. She kept her eyes on her work, perhaps surprised by her own outburst of anger.

"BJ?" Margaret asked quietly.

"Yeah?"

"It's…it's good to see you."

He paused for a moment and risked a look directly at her, and a smile. "It's good to see you, too, Margaret."

"Have you seen Hawkeye?" She asked the question tentatively, as if she were afraid he would answer angrily.

"Not since – Korea. I've got a thirty day furlough after this round of prisoner exchange; I was going to go up to Maine." BJ – the BJ that was not a part of the dream but an impassive observer – didn't know where that plan had come from, but as soon as the words came out of his mouth he knew they were the truth.

"Will you tell him I'm sorry?" she asked, her voice thick with unshed tears.

"Yes, of course," he answered at once. He didn't need to know for what; somehow, he already knew, but his mind flinched away from revealing the information to him.

"Will you bring –" she had to pause a moment, to muffle a sob in her sleeve as she pretended to retrieve something from BJ's medical bag. "Father Mulcahy some flowers?"

"Sure, Margaret," he said, and when she rested her hand on the patient's chest he placed his on top of it, trying to give her whatever fragment of comfort he could. She paused for a grateful moment, but they were mindful of the guard, and quickly returned to work.

---

"Hey, BJ," Hawkeye said, taking a seat at the foot of his friend's bed. He spoke quietly, not wanting to wake up the whole ward. Or even BJ himself. He was on duty, but duty had been very quiet; even the patient he'd suspected of a subdural hematoma had awakened and complained of hangover, not head trauma.

An IV trickled chloroquine and saline solution into BJ's arm. Hawkeye regarded it sorrowfully.

"And you thought your stomach was bad with the preventive dose," he said. Margaret had left a bedpan next to the bed for when BJ started vomiting, which he was expected to do, based on the earlier reaction to the lower dosage of chloroquine, any second now. "Chloroquine's the fastest cure, but it's hard as hell to process." He picked up the chart and inspected it, though there was no real reason to do so; it was too soon to expect that the medication would've had some effect. "Not that you don't already know that. I don't mean to malign your medical expertise over there, Beej, but from where I'm sitting you don't look so good."

He set the chart on his knees and rubbed his forehead. "Oh, BJ, I'm so sorry," he said. "It was stupid of me to tell you you could do without the chloroquine. We should have found some other dosage, or given you mefloquine, or, God, something."

BJ stirred a little, but it was just to yank the blankets a little tighter around himself.

"I remember the first case of malaria I ever treated," he said, folding his arms and smiling wanly at his bunkie. "He was this, this tall, thin…he would've made you look short and fat, BJ. He was a Negro and grew up in Léopoldville, but moved to Boston when he was a teenager. He went back to Congo for his mom's funeral, and…well, it's really not important how he contracted it. I was still a resident, and he came in shaking and sweating. I couldn't have diagnosed it myself, but one of the other doctors had been there longer and saw cases, you know, coming back from Africa and the Pacific after World War Two.

"Anyway, so I was the attending on this case. He didn't have as high a parasite count as you, but he had the more dangerous _plasmodium falciparum_, not the weaker _p. vivax_ you've got, so we gave him the highest recommended dose of chloroquine, and he…reacted. It wasn't, uh, really an adverse reaction, it was just, uh, just standard. He had these dreams, he'd narrate these, these amazingly vivid dreams in English and French and…I don't know, Congolese, whatever they speak down there.

"We'd been medicating him for a day, maybe two, and he leapt up out of bed and barricaded himself in the hospital kitchen. He wouldn't let anybody in, piled a bunch of furniture in front of the door. He thought the, uh, the Force Publique were coming to get him and they were going to chop off his hands because he hadn't gathered enough rubber. The man had been living in the United States for fifteen, twenty years, and he honestly believed that the boogeymen of his childhood were coming to get him.

"We got him out eventually. He fell asleep and we took the door off its hinges. That isn't the point.

"I've seen a lot of malaria cases now. We both see them in here, all the time." Hawkeye paused and ran his hand through his hair. "I hope that where – that whatever you're dreaming now, you aren't as frightened as he was. I hope you're back in Mill Valley with Peg and Erin having the time of your life and you'll take chloroquine recreationally once you're cured."

Hawkeye watched the IV trickle a few more vital but toxic drops into BJ's arm. "I'm going to make this up to you, BJ. I am. I…"

Hawkeye had intended to say more, to cement the promise he had made to his slumbering friend, but he suddenly found that he couldn't look at the way BJ shivered in spite of the sweat beading on his brow. He stomped out into the night and shivered without his coat until he was convinced he was quite as miserable as BJ was. If Lieutenant Clarke noticed when he vanished from the ward, she kept her own counsel upon his return.

---

Big steamin' pile of self-indulgent author's notes:

This was supposed to be a relatively quick story, easy to write and quickly abandoned in favor of my much-neglected novel. Now the draft version on my computer has exceeded 20,000 words, and the story itself has outgrown the neat framework I had designed for it. You know how they say that if ants were the size of people, their exoskeletons wouldn't be strong enough to support them and they would collapse inward on themselves? I'm worried that's what's happening here. The devices that work so well in a one-shot story (like, um, not having a climax or a dénouement) fail when you drag it out into something this long (Not unlike these author's notes, which have already been dragged out into a vacuous inferno of self-indulgence. Er, come to think of it, can something be vacuous and an inferno at the same time?).

Anyway, my point is this: This isn't a novel. While I can promise that it isn't going to disintegrate into one of those interminable stories where Hawkeye and whoever his OTP of the moment is keep dealing with one psychological problem over and over again until it all comes to a "climax" featuring a hackneyed induced vulnerability situation, after which they resolve never to fight again for the sake of the Mary Sue triplets back home, I cannot promise that the conclusion is going to be a sharp catalyst that brings the rest of the story into clearer focus, the way good endings do. I'm working hard on having actual _events_, rather than sittin' around thinkin', for the last couple of chapters, but no promises there either.

Um, just so you can't say you haven't been warned.

Anyway, I'm out of town for a long weekend, but I've got some nice train rides during which I hope to get the next chapter done. The next chapter might be up on Tuesday or a little later.


End file.
